We Kissed Holograms

The movie Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to the 1982 cult classic, and like the original, the sequel has a cyborg, the Blade Runner, K, being sent to retire other cyborgs called replicants who are deemed obsolete or a threat to society. Like the original, we find that the Blade Runner has romantic ties to another artificial being.

Unlike the original however - where the woman in question is another replicant - we find in the sequel that the Blade Runner’s significant other is a mass-marketed AI named Joi, who appears via a projection from a device. Because she has no physical body, a recurring motif in the movie is the struggle for intimacy between the embodied K and Joi the projection.

This struggle becomes particularly poignant when one wants to kiss the other and, though we see some semblances of caress and responses to that caress, we also know as viewers that they are mere pretenses, made evident by the occasional flashes of misalignment between bionic and holographic skins.

A turning point of this narrative comes when Joi enlists the services of a sex-worker replicant named Mariette, whose previous offers for her services were rebuffed by K. In this scene, Mariette is recruited to sync her movements with those of Joi so that, at last, K is able to viscerally experience Joi and not just as a hologram.

Only she is still a hologram, and this is acknowledged by Joi herself when she acknowledged that K had desires for Mariette, and was willing to work through Mariette being the stand in for K’s physical desire so that Joi can “be real for” K, to be K’s object of ultimate desire.

The result of the sync is a near perfect alignment between Joi’s movements and Mariette’s, and the ability for K to align the embrace of Joi in his fantasies with an actual physical embrace of the replicant Mariette.

It is, however, only a near perfect sync. This is made evident in the flashes of misalignment in movements, clothing and, even faces. We see one sliding into another, even in the moments when the kiss is finally made.

While we might dismiss the scene as the projections of a libido riddled sci-fi themed imagination, I argue that this scene is replicated (pun intended) in more situations than we realise, and in less sexually charged situations than we realise.

I mean this in two respects.

In one respect, we are like K who, in the course of pursuing our manifold desires, wind up with our desires directed towards a panoply of objects and persons. While this in and of itself may not be scandalous, what might disturb us is that, all to often, we often find our desires resting on one object, all the while really desiring another. In our sin-stained struggle to find integrity amidst the multiciplicity, we often find ourselves imposing images of one object of desire onto another, and reduce the latter into a stand-in for the former.

In another respect, we can be like the semi-synced Joi and Mariette. As mentioned in a previous post on multiplicity, our promiscuous desires can also cause our very selves to split off, rendering our selves as a conglomeration of sometimes-synced, oftentimes-misaligned movements. We become, like Joi and Mariette, embodied canvasses onto which imagined versions of ourselves are projected. What is more, all this can take place without our knowledge, and can even take place under all our protestations that we are being our integral human selves. But as Slavoj Žižek noted in his The Plague of Fantasies, protestations of “beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology”.

What this means for our human relations is that, on the one hand, we may superimpose our desires onto other things or people, reducing them to mere projection screens for our promiscuous intentions. On the other hand, we may find ourselves at the receiving end of this process, so that we might find ourselves being loved or desired, only insofar as it allows someone else to desire something or someone else. In the end, our sin-stained human relations may end up being a series of holograms chasing other holograms.

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